100 followers on Instagram! Woohoo! I'm beyond excited about this! To celebrate YOU, the followers, I am giving away a 50$ gift card to TpT! Who doesn't have resources they have been waiting to purchase!!!!

I am so excited to see what happens here. I know i'm a new blogger, a new TpT seller and basically new to everything in between, but I know this is an exciting thing for many newbies like me!

I wanted to post and share my beginning stats!

I know, I know... kind of sad.

But! Hopefully, after a little TLC, some positive networking opportunities and the TpT Conference, I'll have a bit of a chance to grow some of these numbers! :)

This brings me to #TpTVegas15! I bit the bullet. I decided to take my teaching expertise, my store and my business sense to the next level by attending the TpT conference in Vegas! I'm new this year, so I don't really know what to expect, but i'm excited to learn all about it and make the most of this learning opportunity!! I'm so excited to meet so many other people there!

I can't wait to attend this conference. This is going to be so much more than the PD I have gotten to be a part of so far. One of the sessions is entitled 'from sketch to digital masterpiece... This session especially excites me. I recently purchased a wacom tablet. It intrigued me when I saw it online. It literally tickled my artistic fancy, however I don't really know how to use it to it's full potential! :(

I have always been somewhat artistically inclined... dabbling in different creative outlets and I feel like this will be another thing that will really add to my classroom resources.

EDIT - It's now August 27th, and here are my after stats. I'm still not a giant seller by any means... but LOOK! GROWTH!

Forgive me for rambling on... My excitement level has hit it's peak as I enter into my last 2 weeks of school and 24 days until VEGAS!!! Yes!! I hope I get to meet so many new teacher friends on this trip! I really can't wait!

That being said... I am throwing a TpT sale! Stop by my store for 20% off all my products! :)

I don't know about you, but one of the problems I had in my classroom this year was TATTLING!

"So and so did this and that and the other thing."

Oy. This was beginning to become a problem!

ENTER

THE TATTLE MONSTER!

Now, I know what you are thinking. 'How did you afford to hire a monster to be in your classroom all the time?'

Well, my friend. I didn't. Believe it or not, I made this bad boy out of a kleenex box! It's true! He's not the best looking monster as I quickly created him on my lunch break. Though, he does the trick.

Here is how it works!

First we talk about things that we should always always tell the teacher. Things like

- If someone gets hurt or is bleeding

- If students cannot come to a solution, and the problem is getting bigger

- Etc.

Then we talk about what a small problem is

- 'Someone took my marker'

- 'Someone took my eraser'

--Typically these are problems that I want them to use their words to sort through. However, if they cannot sort through it, and I am busy with a student or something, I encourage students to feed their problem to the tattle monster so that they can continue on with their work, and they aren't disrupting my teaching with their big problems.

Once we go through a few scenarios in which students will have to think about 'is this a big problem that my teacher needs to know right now, or a problem that she can solve later' we introduce the tattle monster.

At this point, I read my 'tattle monster' poem....

Once we read the poem, we even named him. That way if a student starts to tell me something I'm too busy to deal with, and it isn't urgent, I just say "go feed Pete that tattle" and off they go to write it down!

Here is how I have Pete set up on my whiteboard (he's held up with magnets inside his mouth)

Today, I finally emptied out my tattle monster after a couple weeks, and apparently one of my students is offended by rudeness! LOL, I may need to teach her how to spell rude*.